


above the stars, they crackle in fire

by yeswayappianway



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Background Relationships, Gen, No Plot/Plotless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 15:43:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17870069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeswayappianway/pseuds/yeswayappianway
Summary: Sometimes, Vex gets restless at night.





	above the stars, they crackle in fire

**Author's Note:**

> set vaguely mid-one year time skip during Episode 95: One Year Later...
> 
> just a character study-esque thing that i wrote on a plane
> 
> not beta-ed at all, so let me know if you spot any typos!
> 
> title from We Are Alive by Bruce Springsteen

It’s the middle of the night, but it’s not like they’re in the castle. It’s not one of the reasons Vex had wanted to live in her own house, but it’s a nice perk. She doesn’t bother leaving a note, just slips out of bed. Percy doesn’t budge from where he’s very lightly snoring. Even his snores are somehow refined, she thinks, equally amused and bewildered. Vex takes a moment to look at him. It’s not like he loses all his cynicism and premature age in his sleep. None of them sleep peacefully, and Percy less so than most, so he’s frowning even now. There is something, though, something different. Maybe it’s the unselfconsciousness of the snoring, an involuntary and undignified sound that Percy would never be caught dead doing while awake. Whatever it is makes Vex feel a twist of fondness so sudden it’s almost painful. She’s glad Percy isn’t awake because she would have no idea how to explain it. He isn’t, so she just walks silently across their bedroom to her closet. The door squeaks sometimes, but she knows how to avoid it, and it swings open noiselessly. She pulls on undergarments and basic clothes, and then, making a split-second decisions, grabs her old leather armor. She doesn’t think she’ll need it, but she’d rather take the precaution. Besides, it’s warm.

Closing the closet door again, Vex slips out of the bedroom, the grays of the world in the dark as familiar as anything. She’s not her brother, but her brother isn’t the only one who can sneak around. She makes her way downstairs. The house is quiet around her, although it makes a lot of small noises she’d never expected before they lived in Grayskull Keep. Houses make noise, just by existing, and in the dark of night, Vex thinks maybe that’s a good metaphor for something. There’s an itch under her skin that’s driven her out of bed at this hour, after all, and she wonders if she could talk to the house, if it would tell her something similar. Sometimes, she just gets an unbearable urge to _do_ something.

They keep their gear in a side room off the sitting room, in the same hallway that leads to Tary and Percy’s workshop. Tary had made a very fancy arcane lock that responded to their touch only, and it still amuses Vex to no end that she’s the one with a magical, complicated lock protecting valuables instead of breaking into one. She lays her hand on the plate in place of a lock on the door, and when it swings open, she makes sure to step over the pressure plate Percy had installed inside the door. He’d been very excited to booby trap their house, and she was willing to indulge him. Vex hopes that Vax decides to try and break in one day.

Fenthras seems to shift and grow slightly as she looks at it, leaning on the wall next to Bad News. _His and hers weapons_ , she thinks wryly. They should have put that in the wedding somehow. But that’s not what she wants tonight. Laying on a bench on the other side of the small room is her broom. She grabs it, then puts it back down to sit on the bench herself and pull her armor on. She leaves off some of the more fiddly parts, suddenly even more impatient than she’d been before. When she finally has enough on to be presentable and hopefully less cold, she grabs the broom again and heads outside, closing the door to the storeroom behind her. She picks up a cloak from the pile in the front hallway—someone must have knocked them over again—and opens the front door.

The rush of cold air hits Vex in the face, and she grins instinctively. Whitestone is cold at night, the wind blowing off the mountains a near constant, which makes it even chillier but also means the clouds don’t usually last. She spends a minute with her face upturned to the sky, drinking in the sight of the stars and the moon and the soft black of the night behind them. She can feel her heart pounding in her chest, and she breathes out, watching it condense in the cold and blow away with the wind.

 _How could she ever live without this?_ she thinks. She takes off through the town for the edge of the Parchwood.

She only passes one guard as she goes, and the guard just nods her head as Vex walks by. She feels like a child again, barely waiting until the guard is past to break out into a run. Vex can’t remember the last time she ran out of pure whim, not because something might catch her if she didn’t. It doesn’t last long, but even as she slows to a walk again, she can feel herself bouncing along with more of a spring than usual.

It doesn’t take her long to get outside of the town, away from any possible watching eyes. Not that she’s doing anything improper, she just… this is something for her alone. Vex doesn’t have much like that, and she likes it that way, but every once in a while, she gets this restless wild urge, and it feels like if anyone else knew, it would ruin it somehow.

Before she gets really into the trees, she stops. She mounts up on the broom, spitting the Draconic word, and imagining that the broom feels as eager as she does. There’s a moment where she thinks she’s forgotten her ridiculous hat, and then remembers Scanlan isn’t here to call her on it, and she lets herself feel the familiar dull ache of not knowing if she’ll ever see Scanlan again. She can’t dwell on it, though, not tonight, not with her whole body shivering with the cold and the adrenaline of being out like this. She kicks off the ground and shoots up.

Ever since they first came to Whitestone, Vex has been enthralled with the way it seems to fit so perfectly into the landscape. Seeing it from above only adds to that impression. It’s as if Pelor sculpted Whitestone out of the mountains, and then put it down in the place he’d scraped the material from. Especially now, with all the stone of the castle and the roads and some of the older houses and buildings gleaming in the moonlight, it has an abnormally natural look to it. It’s nothing like the smooth curves of Syngorn or the wild overgrown nature of the Feywild. Vex flies higher, revelling in watching the details become smaller.

She slowly spins the broom around, taking in all of her surroundings. Vex throws her hands out to the sides, gripping the broom with her thighs and trusting the precautions now built into it. The wind whistles through her fingers. She wonders if this is how Keyleth feels all the time, the way she feels so connected to the wind, the whole sky, the whole _world_. Vex laughs wildly. She can feel her heartbeat in her throat and it’s perfect.

Without even thinking about it, she leans forward on the broom, taking off as fast as she possibly can make it go. She feels herself shooting through the air like one of her own arrows, hurtling toward the mountains. She had only meant to stay out for a little while, but now she feels like she could fly for hours and still feel this same exhilaration. Vex doesn’t think of herself as particularly preoccupied. She tries to live in the moment, and all that trite bullshit, and she thinks she mostly succeeds. But somehow, this is more alive than she’s felt at any time outside of—she doesn’t know when. Fighting a dragon, maybe. She thinks of all the cliches of songs and stories, her blood singing, her eyes sparkling, something primal and beautiful buried deep in her mind rising to the surface.

She’s passing over a tall grove of evergreens when she decides to swoop down. There’s no gradual change, she just angles the broom down, diving at full speed toward the top of the tallest tree, and pulling to one side just in time to slice past it, the whisper of needles shifting in the wind of her wake barely registering in her ears. She considers pulling up and going back up to the open sky, but she feels like trying something foolish and reckless, so she stays at a level just below the tops of the trees, weaving through them almost by instinct instead of by sight. _Why not_ , she thinks as she turns almost completely upside down to avoid one particularly tall tree.

Vex spends a few more minutes zooming between the trees, chasing that daredevil impulse before soaring back up into the open night. The wind hits her harder, the cold rushing against her face a shock after the partial insulation the trees had given her. It shocks another laugh out of her.

She climbs up even higher, less quickly now, staring up into the stars that seem almost to be surrounding her as she heads for the castle. She’s feeling almost ready to head back, but not quite yet. It’s not right yet.

The castle shines in the moonlight. Vex thinks of how impressed she had been, a whole castle, and how differently it feels to her now. It is still impressive, for sheer size and intentionally awe-inspiring architecture, but the old instintive cataloging of wealth has dulled for her. She’s not sure if that’s because she has her own wealth now, some of it in that very castle, or just that different things impress her now. Either way, it feels familar and almost comforting in its impassive, massive presence. She takes a lazy circle around the whole castle, peering down into the courtyards and on the walls from the level of the highest towers. Spotting a guard, she waves to them cheerily, and without waiting to see if they even noticed her, she speeds up again, racing down over the town to her house.

Vex skims over the roofs of the town, her earlier reluctance to encounter anyone gone. Once she reaches the street in front of the house, she simply drops down, letting the broom fall and stopping it a few feet off the ground so she can spring off and call the broom down. There’s no one to see her little display, but that’s no reason not to show off. The ground feels strange, pulsing against her feet just as the wind had against her hands in the air. Vex is sure it’s just blood rushing to them, but it feels like something more. She thinks of Keyleth again as she goes inside, her easy shift into elemental form, and wonders.

Returning the broom to the storeroom is easy, standard, and Vex goes through it without any real thought. It’s only as she’s walking back up the stairs that she begins thinking about the next day. She’s supposed to help Tary at the Slayer’s Take, and she should probably check in with Cassandra. Vex realizes that she hadn’t been thinking about any of that while she was on her broom, and while she doesn’t think that was the main benefit to her night flight, she’s certainly not upset about the break from her plans.

“Have a good walk?” Percy says, a little slurred with sleep, when she walks back into the bedroom.

“A flight, actually,” Vex says, hushed. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”

He shakes his head, barely propped up on his hand. “I woke up while you were gone, only a few minutes ago. Did you spot something interesting?”

It’s Vex’s turn to shake her head. “No. I just—wanted to feel alive.”

Percy doesn’t answer, but there’s an expression on his face that looks like he’s trying to solve a problem. She laughs softly.

“Go back to sleep, darling. You can try and understand in the morning.”

He looks like he wants to argue, but his eyes are already fluttering closed again, and he just sinks back onto the pillow.

Vex strips quickly, or as quickly as she can, at least, but before slipping back under the covers, she walks over to the window and looks up at the stars for a moment. Something like her earlier wildness settles inside of her, and she grins to herself as she gets back in bed.


End file.
